Anyone want to speculate on why the price of bitcoin has been trending up, what seems to me to be sharply, over the last week? Did I miss a bit of news that made bitcoin much more valuable?

A major gambling site is said to accept bitcoins soon.

I think that provably fair gambling, ease of cash-out (really the whole concept of cash-out may be rendered obsolete), anonymity, and lack of charge-backs add up to gambling being the "killer app" for bitcoin. It gives significant benefits to both sides.

Saving a couple of % on CC charges, and avoiding fraud and chargebacks is a "killer app" for low margin resellers like *mazon but unfortunately the vendor cannot strongly influence how the customer pays. But if gambling helps us get to 1B-10B -- if it puts BTC in the hands of a significant minority of the population then this will bring us the rest of the way.

Vice is often an early adopter of many technologies -- the internet, beepers and cell phones are a few examples. And those are the uses that make the news. This has been a public service message for newbies concerned with how this technology is being used.

As a market-cap-weighted index, the largest stocks in the S&P 500 have a bigger impact on the movement of the index than the smallest stocks. This has hurt the S&P 500 quite significantly recently due to the big fall in Apple (AAPL), which is not only the biggest stock in the index, but the biggest stock in the world (as of now). The S&P 500 is still a few percentage points below its all-time high, but if you look at the index on an equal-weighted basis, where all stocks have the same weighting, it just recently made a new all-time high.

As a market-cap-weighted index, the largest stocks in the S&P 500 have a bigger impact on the movement of the index than the smallest stocks. This has hurt the S&P 500 quite significantly recently due to the big fall in Apple (AAPL), which is not only the biggest stock in the index, but the biggest stock in the world (as of now). The S&P 500 is still a few percentage points below its all-time high, but if you look at the index on an equal-weighted basis, where all stocks have the same weighting, it just recently made a new all-time high.